(04-15-2015, 01:25 PM)jlp Wrote: I see a new note arrived since I started composing my previous one, pointing out that LTS versions of some platforms have their own limitations too.
Maybe a better question for the community would be "Are you willing to switch provider or platform, if needed for a CI4 using a higher version of PHP than you have"?
I guess we're jumping each other's posts here
Personally, for the foreseeable future, I can push to use whatever PHP platform I wish, though getting outside of what is included in a well-supported OS release can be difficult, at best. I'm not particularly concerned about the choice of version making it difficult or impossible for me to use a future version of CI. The reasoning behind the choice is more important to me, as it tells me something about where the framework is headed.
A lot of developers are concerned that developing for a given version of PHP gives hosting providers and OS vendors a reason to stay with unsupported versions of PHP, and I can understand the reluctance in that case. However, I think most hosting providers and OS vendors are interested in system stability more than anything else, and, traditionally, the best way to maintain such stability is to severely limit the non-security related updates on that platform.
The majority of a given hosting provider's users will probably be using a pre-packaged framework or CMS, also provided by the host, or no framework at all. Additionally, very few frameworks have a maximum PHP version on which they will run at this time. So, unless the provider has a particularly close relationship with (or sees a particularly large demand for) a given framework, no single framework is likely to have much of an impact on what version of any software is available on a given provider's servers.
Of course, if any single software package could cause a wide-spread upgrade by hosting providers and server vendors, it would probably be WordPress. If they move their minimum version above CI's, it would probably be pretty safe to match it (but I don't see any evidence of that happening from their end).
